Recent decades have seen considerable advancements in bio-informatics and artificial intelligence in medicine. Various computerized expert systems have been developed to collate medical data with varied diseases to aid physicians in diagnosing and prescribing treatments for their patients. Numerous systems exist that provide diagnoses or suggest treatment strategies.
However, the knowledge base for medicine is vast and varied. There are disparate libraries, books, articles, and papers that describe various aspects of medical knowledge written in natural languages. Even where information about a specific disease is collated and provided in a comprehensive document, there is no mechanism by which this document can be immediately utilized to diagnose a disease without a careful review.
The ability to make intelligent conclusions based on the available knowledge is a difficult task, owing to the complex informatics, inferential, and value-laden nature and character of medical decision-making.